Dan Bites

This recipe is based on an old Yiddish-a-bachur dish. I made a similar dish years ago at my old man’s house and thought it’d be good again. It was, but I might have made it a tad spicy for preggo’s taste buds. It’s that cayenne pepper I love so much. It didn’t turn out quite as pretty as I had wanted because the phyllo dough I had was pretty old and not as easy to work with as a fresh bought pack. I had to work faster than normal and didn’t get as many photos as I would have liked. Oh well, what can you do? It still tasted pretty damn good and that’s all that really matters.

My ingredient list included 12 oz of skinned salmon that I cut into three portions (we only needed one lunch the next day instead of 2), 1/2 cup of strained tomato, 1 14 oz can of diced tomatoes, 5 garlic cloves minced, 2 ribs of celery chopped, the juice from half a lemon, 1 green bell pepper diced, 1/2 onion diced, 1 broccoli head broken down with stem skinned and chopped, a handful of cilantro chopped, and some phyllo dough (they spell it Fillo, take your pick).

Before I made the sauce I salted and peppered the salmon and then squeezed the lemon juice all over. I let it sit and rest while making the sauce. I heated up my sauce pan and added about 1 tablespoon of olive oil. I sweated down the onion, celery, and green pepper for about 7 minutes before adding the garlic and letting it saute for another 1 minute or so. Then I poured in the strained tomato and the canned tomatoes and let them boil down for about another 7 minutes. I grabbed my cayenne and ground cloves out of the spice rack and threw a few dashes of each in. Cut back on the cayenne if you want it less spicy. I seasoned with salt and pepper, turned of the heat, and stirred in the cilantro.

Working as fast as possible and using a moist dish towel to keep the phyllo from drying out I wrapped up the salmon. I layered 3-4 sheets on top of each other, topped it with a piece of salmon, spooned some of the sauce on top of the salmon, wrapped it all up, place it on an olive oiled baking sheet, and brushed more olive oil all over the phyllo to give it a nice golden color in the oven. I did this for all three pieces of salmon. Then, I put the sheet into a 400 degree oven for about 20 minutes.

I steamed the broccoli during the last 5 minutes of baking time and re-heated the rest of the sauce. To serve, I threw it all on a plate and slapped a bowl of white rice next to it.